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June 6, 2005

The problem with Changing to x86

Again, referring to the news of the day "Apple to ditch IBM, switch to Intel chips", I gotta say it. The last transition, from the motorola chips to the PPCs...sort of....hmm....sucked. Lots of crashing.....like way past windows crashing type stuff. Eeee.

I hope it goes better this time, and I hope they have enough cash to weather the lack of sales until first customer ship. Lots of others have comented on the osborne like potential of this thing. A rocky road ahead for Apple.

You know, now would be as good a time as there might be to change their name, now that they are a music company and all. Maybe something like the imusic corporation. Or imac or isomething. iJobs? iSteve? iSteverino?

3 comments:

What I would like to know is, what’s the difference in CPU performance between the latest Motorola chip to the PPC back than and what is the difference in CPU performance between the PPC and the x86 chips Apple are going to use now.

The problem back than was that the new chips were not strong enough to support some of the emulations created to support old software.

I suspect this has more to do with supply issues, money, development toolchain, and big-stakes game theory than with the actual power of the chip. Intel plays a great game of GHZ up the wazoo but in general the top-end chips for both platforms have been pretty even. Not to mention, most real-world performance issues these days come down to graphics, memory, cache, threading, and a host of integration issues, not the actual CPU speed.

Watch the keynote. A nifty little graph is shown that spells it out. In the next year, the PowerPC's roadmap shows their processors' unit-of-work per watt at less than half of what Intel could deliver.

Now, that graph was probably very telling. The G5 at 2.4GHz can probably perform similarly to a 3.4GHz P4, but at a higher heat level and power-usage rate.